Illegal medications seized in 16 African countries

An unprecedented crackdown in 16 African countries netted 82 million doses of illegal or counterfeit drugs, including antibiotics, contraceptives and malaria treatments, the World Customs Organisation (WCO) said on Thursday.

The operation, called Vice Grips 2, was carried out by customs inspectors in 16 ports from July 11 to 20, it said.

"It is the biggest operation of its kind," Christophe Zimmermann, in charge of anti-counterfeit operations at the WCO, said at a press conference in Paris.

The street value of the drugs was $40 million (30 million euros), which points to commerce with an annual turnover of $5 billion, he said.

The biggest hauls were made in Angola, Cameroon, Ghana and Togo. Most of the illicit drugs came from East and South Asia—particularly China—and the Middle East, notably Dubai.

Illegal medications are a growing problem in Africa, as they may be toxic or fail to have a sufficient dose of active ingredient to combat a disease, Zimmermann and others said.

Inspectors helped by a French anti-counterfeit agency searched 110 shipping containers, 84 of which were found to have illegal or fake medications.

Some of the merchandise pointed to elaborate or even industrial-scale operations, the two agencies said.

Inspectors found 33 million doses of fake medications, along with pornographic DVDs, that had been stashed deep inside a batch of loudspeakers that were being exported to Angola. None of the "drugs" had any active ingredient.

In Togo, a smuggled batch of expectorant cough syrup, supposed to be kept at a cool, stable temperature of -2 to +4 degrees Celsius (28-39 degrees Fahrenheit), was literally cooking in a container where the temperature was more than 50 C (122 F).

"Africa is now being used as a rubbish tip, and this directly affects consumer health and safety," Zimmermann said.

"We are dealing with structured organisations that specialise in international fraud, which exploit globalisation in operations that span continents and countries, using different forms of transport."

Two further operations would be staged in Africa over the next six months in order to maintain momentum on the drug fakers, said the WCO's secretary general, Kunio Mikuriya.

In a thrust against the major problem of counterfeit medicines sold in developing countries, which causes thousands of illnesses and deaths annually, scientists today described development of a simple, paper-strip test that ...

Counterfeiting of drugs is a huge industry with an annual turnover of more than SEK 500 billion. In Africa the situation is extremely serious. Half of the malaria medication sold there could be ineffective or even harmful. ...

Recommended for you

The Food and Drug Administration is warning doctors against over-prescribing testosterone-boosting drugs for men, saying the popular treatments have not been established as safe or effective for common age-related ...

Four years have passed since the introduction of the German Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG). AMNOG was primarily aimed at containing the increasing drug expenditure of the statutory health insurance ...

In a new survey, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that physicians report relatively high awareness of state databases that track drug prescriptions but more than one-fifth indicated ...

User comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.